Book of Knowledge

This is a fragment from Oahspe, a 19th-century American channeled religious text in the tradition of spiritualism and new religious revelation, written in deliberate imitation of biblical prose. The fragment presents a dialogue between Tae — a figure representing universal humanity's collective spiritual yearning — and Jehovih (God), with intermediary voices named Kosmon and Esfoma responding on Jehovih's behalf. The central content is Tae's escalating demand for direct, personal knowledge of the spirit world and immortal life, moving from wanting proof of the afterlife to insisting on firsthand comprehension rather than secondhand testimony — explicitly refusing to accept the word of spirits claiming to be Christ, Buddha, or even Jehovih himself. Jehovih responds by declaring a new age (Kosmon) in which angels descend to Earth to demonstrate immortality directly, framing this as a turning point from faith based on old revelation to knowledge appropriate to a more mature humanity. The text's most distinctive intellectual move comes through Esfoma's extended argument that "exact science" is itself a form of shared illusion — illustrated through a playful demonstration that the numeral "10" is a symbol standing in for a symbol, with no connection to true quantity — concluding that conventional scientific certainty is merely acquiesced-upon falsehood, not genuine truth. This epistemological critique is unusual for its genre: it simultaneously validates Tae's demand for empirical rigor and undermines the very foundations of empirical knowledge, leaving direct spiritual experience as the only honest path to understanding.

Book of Knowledge

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